That going to be bad. I tried other distro not just Debian based. I actually installed pulse audio which was available through there repository. It conflicted with the current audio & you couldn't uninstall the default without breaking your system. Firefox is supposed to have an unbranded release version (Not iceweasel), what every happen to that? Would that have the same requirement?

groze wrote:That going to be bad. I tried other distro not just Debian based. I actually installed pulse audio which was available through there repository. It conflicted with the current audio & you couldn't uninstall the default without breaking your system. Firefox is supposed to have an unbranded release version (Not iceweasel), what every happen to that? Would that have the same requirement?

The Alsa code is still there but you'll have to compile the code with --enable-alsa and maybe --disable-pulseaudio. So it's possible, but it's up to the maintainers if they decide to follow the official route or not. Mozilla wont work on Alsa fixes though.

The Alsa code is still there but you'll have to compile the code with --enable-alsa and maybe --disable-pulseaudio. So it's possible, but it's up to the maintainers if they decide to follow the official route or not. Mozilla wont work on Alsa fixes though.

this is the bit of hard info i was looking for. thanks.my archlinux' (without pulseaudio) firefox is on 51.something now.we'll see what happens when it hits 52; I can only hope arch devs are sane enough to use the --enable-alsa switch.

whatever little truth the rumour is based on, it's not like the title says.

i tried to make sense of the bug report, but couldn't. too much noise.

It's not unfounded panic, it's not a rumour, it's official announcement from Mozilla : "From Firefox 52 onwards, pulseaudio is a hard requirement for sound on linux. Alsa is unsupported and alsa code will be removed in Firefox 54." All this is written on the bug report you failed to make sense of.

Firefox 52 has just been released and the issue is now live and kicking.

debiman wrote:can you back that with some info?i guess the info is in that bug report?could you please point the relevant sections out.

From this Arch bug report[1] about the issue, it seems that the upcoming Firefox sandbox feature breaks Alsa. Alsa code will stay in Firefox unsupported until its removal in Firefox 54. In the meantime there is a build time flag --enable-alsa to compile Firefox with alsa support.

From the Mozilla bug, OP states without substantiating that this move is made to reduce the problems and maintenance associated with maintaining multiple audio backends. Then says "The point is to avoid people accidentally not installing Pulse Audio and having a broken/poor playback experience." without explaining why it would be so. Others argue that "Making it a hard dependency makes the choice "install libpulse or don't use Firefox", rather than "install libpulse otherwise you won't have sound in Firefox"."

About 75% of the sound issues I've experienced in Linux over the years were solved by uninstalling pulseaudio to use alsa, to me this is trying to fix something that's not broken and I fall precisely in the "install libpulse or don't use Firefox" case. So I guess I'll pin Firefox to v51 while I decide which other web browser to use.

Then after the release of Firefox 52 this "feature" grabbed the attention of users unhappy with this move and after two complaints in the bug report the comments have been restricted.